In his
already classic Books of the Brave, the recently deceased Irving
Leonard records how, by the spring of 1605, as the annual fleets made
their way to the New World, numerous copies of the just published El
ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha crossed the Atlantic. In
fact, by his sedulous calculations, Leonard estimates that a good portion
of the book's first printing made the voyage, and that not a few of the
volumes met a fate common to travelers at the time by sinking to the depths
of the ocean. But many did make it to the ports of Spain's American empire,
and a mere two years after the publication of Cervantes' book (in 1607)
the figures of the knight and his squire made their appearance in a Lima
carnival.(2) There is much significance in this journey
of the books, not the least of which is that their excursion was strictly
speaking illegal, given that the shipment of novels to the colonies had
been forbidden by the zealous Spanish Crown. We know, however, again thanks
to Leonard, that because of the imperial bureaucracy's lax discharge of
its duties, this prohibition was mostly observed in the breach, as were
other government decrees, which were greeted with the cagey formula "se
acata, pero no se cumple" ("complied with, but not implemented"). The
Quijote's early and furtive journey to what would become Latin
America, prefigures the book's perplexing legacy in the literary history
of the region.

I would
like to examine how the Quijote has been re-written in Latin America
in contrast to Spain, being that these constitute disparate strands in
the literary tradition of one single language. In Spain, Don Quijote
underwent a process of canonization that began in the eighteenth century,
just as the Spanish American colonies were starting on the political and
ideological road that led to independence. The canonization of Cervantes'
book in Spain eventually involved the association of Spanishness with
the novel's hero, and its conception a sort of telluric birth from the
volksgeist. Cervantes had presumably expressed the very essence
of the nation --or allowed it to express itself through him-- and this
is what made the Quijote a classic of the language. The identification
of the book with Spain climaxed in the Generation of '98, when the question
of national identity reached a crisis, provoked by the motherland's crushing
defeat in the Spanish American War. As the last of the Spanish colonies
in America were becoming independent, the beatings suffered by proud Don
Quijote became a national myth to suffer the motherland's valiant, but
unsuccessful battle with the new Knight of the White Moon: the modern,
powerful, fully armed United States of America. Nothing typifies better
the incorporation of Don Quijote into the national mythology than the
disastrous naval battle of Santiago de Cuba, when Rear Admiral Pascual
Cervera y Topete lost the entire Spanish fleet in an insanely heroic gesture
ordered by the Spanish government.

(During
the early summer of 1898, Cervera sailed with the Spanish fleet into Santiago
Bay, in eastern Cuba, following the orders of his government. He was trapped
there by the American fleet three times the size of his, which simply
deployed itself outside the harbor's narrow entrance. Cervera and the
Spanish government debated what to do in a series of frantic telegrams,
with the Real Admiral warning Madrid that the fleet would meet certain
doom if it ventured out. The Spanish ships were obsolete and the range
of their guns much shorter than the Americans'. In a Quixotic gesture,
if there was ever one, Madrid ordered Cervera to try to break the blockade:
"la Escuadra saldrá resueltamente lo mejor que pueda, confiando
su destino a su valor y pericia de V.E. y de los distinguidos jefes que
la mandan, que, indudablemente confirmarán con sus hechos la reputación
de que gozan" (Havana, 28 June, 1898). Cervera's ships headed out one
by one and the Americans had a turkey shoot, sinking all of them. The
Rear Admiral was fished out of the water by the victors and accorded military
honors, for which he was duly impressed and satisfied, as he wired back
home).(3)

Compelling
essays and books by Ramiro de Maeztu, Azorín, and above all Miguel
de Unamuno, casting Don Quijote in the role of national symbol, constitute
an important chapter in Spain's literary and intellectual history. (4)
I am thinking chiefly of Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina,
La ruta de don Quijote and Vida de don Quijote y Sancho.
These books are also among the best critical commentary on the Quijote,
whose impact can be felt throughout the twentieth century in the work
of influential scholars such as Américo Castro, and in novelists
like Juan Goytisolo. Defining the essence of Spain in the modern period
has nearly always led back to Don Quijote, who has gone from literary
to national myth, and merited the unusual honor, for a fictional character,
of having a statue of it erected in the capital. (The issue of Cervantes
and Quijote statues has been shrewdly studied by James Fernández
in an essay from which I have learned a great deal).(5)
This is the bountiful legacy of what some scholars have called the "romantic
approach" to the Quijote, particularly Anthony Close in his well-informed
but bleak book, which is a plea for what would amount to a critical lobotomy.(6)

But the
preceding does not apply to Latin America, where the Quijote was
not part of any national myth-making. It was around 1898, as a matter
of fact, that Modernismo, the first literary movement begun in
Latin America, was peaking and exerting influence back in the motherland.
Modernismo and Noveintaiocho constitute a parting of the
waters in Spanish-language literary history, although they share some
common traits. How has Cervantes been read and re-written by Latin Americans
who cannot identify with Spanish obsessions about a Spanish essence while
writing in Spanish? How can one read a classic in one's own language without
being involved in a process of monumentalization, cultural self-probing
and even nationalistic narcissism?

It is
true that on occasion, through the twentieth century, movements of ethnic
or cultural pride in Latin America, a panhispanismo, have made
of the mad knight a figure of some political importance. Cervantes has
also been incorporated, needless to say, in educational programs and pageants
of linguistic and literary celebration, a process that Fernández
appropriately defines as "late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century
attempts to heal the wounds between Spain and Spanish America, to close
'Latin' ranks, in the face of the emergence of that formidable 'enemy'
to the north the United States" (p. 969). The high point of this process
may very well have been the following event on the same island that Cervera
defended with noble futility. When the Cuban Revolution shut down and
confiscated independent newspapers, the lead, type and paper were recycled
to print a huge edition of the Quijote that was distributed free
among the people. The agent behind all this, from his position as head
of the national publishing house, was none other than Alejo Carpentier.(7)
This was the return of a Spanish Don Quijote, lowering his lance anew
against the very same Knight of the White Moon as in 1898. But the recovery
of the Quijote by literature took different paths in Spain and
Latin America, as did that of the baroque poets.(8) The
process began with Mexican José Joaquín Fernández
de Lizardi's Don Catrín de la Fachenda (1825), written in
avowed imitation of Cervantes, and reached a high point in Ecuatorian
Juan Montalvo's pastiche Capítulos que se le olvidaron a Cervantes
(1895). There were others in the early part of the twentieth century,
but I am interested here in how the contemporary narrative tradition has
rewritten Cervantes' classic, focusing on its founding writers: Jorge
Luis Borges and Alejo Carpentier.

Borges
taught Latin American writers (including Carpentier) how to assimilate
the innovations of European modernism, and also that they were a part
of that movement, in spite of their geographical or even cultural marginality.(9)
He also taught them how they were and at the same time were not part of
the Spanish literary tradition, with the test case being the Quijote.
In fact, Borges wrote with some irritation about how the Spanish were
misreading the Quijote, sometimes alluding precisely to the Generation
of 98 writers I mentioned before. In a 1947 special issue of Sur
to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Cervantes' birth, Borges
wrote: "Paradójica la gloria del Quijote. Los ministros de la letra
lo exaltan; en su discurso negligente ven (han resuelto ver) un dechado
del estilo español y un confuso museo de arcaísmos, de idiotismos
y de refranes. Nada los regocija como simular que este libro (cuya universalidad
no se cansan de publicar) es una especie de secreto español, negado
a las naciones de la tierra pero accesible a un grupo selecto de aldeanos."
And in "Magias parciales del Quijote" Borges says: "A las vastas
y vagas geografías del Amadís opone los polvorientos caminos
y los sórdidos mesones de Castilla; imaginemos a un novelista de
nuestro tiempo que destacara con sentido paródico las estaciones
de aprovisionamiento de nafta. Cervantes ha creado para nosotros la poesía
de la España del siglo XVII, pero ni aquel siglo ni aquella España
eran poéticas para él; hombres como Unamuno o Azorín
o Antonio Machado, enternecidos ante la evocación de la Mancha,
le hubieran sido incomprensibles." (10) While Carpentier,
for his part, taught Latin American writers how to turn Latin American
history into narrative fiction; or, better yet, how early American historiography
and the novel were linked at birth, with the linchpin being Cervantes.

Broadly
speaking, I am interested in how a literary tradition coheres within a
language without the ideological and emotional grounding of a sense of
nationality, how a literature can continue to exhibit continuities over
historical divides --how an origin endures. For example, how Celestina
can be the sub-text of Aura and Cobra. But with the Quijote,
anointed as the vessel of the very essence of the language and spirit
of the nation, and owing to the baffling self-reflexiveness of the text,
the choice to rewrite it has to be more deliberate and self-questioning
on the part of the contemporary author. Herein lies the specificity of
this conundrum in the case of Cervantes and the Latin American narrative.
How can a Latin American writer presume to rewrite that which is essentially
tied to the nation that his own nation struggled not to be? One could
also ask if this is not a fundamental American condition, the search for
origins that are non-determining and stand precariously on a break with
the past? And wouldn't the very quest constitute a profoundly contradictory
operation, the search for a non-essential kind of essentialism? Perhaps
this is the fate of all American literary efforts and the first lesson
to be learned from Borges' and Carpentier's complicated rewritings of
the Quijote.(11)

In modern
Spain, then, the Quijote is read because it is associated with
the essence of language and nationhood, therefore with a motivated conception
of the origins of language and literary tradition; with a genealogically
determined birth of the text. In Latin America the Quijote is read
for its suggestion of its unmotivated conception in language, hence by
delving into origins that are contingent because they are historical (Carpentier)
or that pitilessly question themselves by denying their own legitimacy
(Borges). Borges' and Carpentier's relative foreignness to Spanish surely
influenced their skepticism, their refusal to easily recognize an enabling
connection between language and the imagination, and between language
and the shape, cohesiveness or meaning of the literary text. But it may
also reflect Cervantes' own deepest disbelief, as reflected in the air
of improvisation and serendipity attendant to the plot structure and details
of Part I --the notorious olvidos cervantinos (Cervantean oversights)
that may constitute the farthest questioning in the Quijote about
the coherence of the work and even that of the author's own self, truly
perilous cracks of nihilistic madness. The lack of motivation is what
provokes the turn to Cervantes' play of authorship. Another slightly foreign
Latin American author (let's just say Argentine), Julio Cortázar
obviously focused on chance and improvisation as crucial factors in literary
creation in his Rayuela, elements that he may have also derived
from the Quijote. Morelli (notice the non-Hispanic name), the internal
author in Cortázar's novel, is a modern version of the narrator
in Cervantes' book. Melquíades' manuscript in Cien años
de soledad and the various textual plays with the status of writing
in Yo el Supremo and the character of Patiño are all turns
to the second most important character created by Cervantes in the Quijote;
not Sancho, but the author, or authors in the fiction. By insisting on
these elements a Latin American reading of Cervantes' masterpiece uncouples
creation from any essence that gives the text an ontologically determined
or revealing order.

The second
lesson to be learned from Latin American rewritings of the Quijote
is that Cervantes as a figure of the author is more important than
Don Quijote the character, whereas in the Spanish readings Don Quijote
is more important. Cervantes in Latin America; Don Quijote in Spain. Remember
the Generation of 98 titles: Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina,
La ruta de don Quijote and Vida de don Quijote y Sancho.
This distinction is at the base of my plotting of this story of Spanish-language
literary history.

Borges
first read Cervantes in English and Carpentier's forays into his father's
library were mostly in French.(12) The point of departure
of "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" is that Menard was not even
a Spanish speaker by birth or upbringing. This fact is crucial in Borges'
reading of Cervantes' book, as suggested by that story and other texts.
Columbus, whose writings Carpentier places at the beginning of Latin American
fiction in El arpa y la sombra was not a native Spanish speaker
either. A non-national origin of writing is crucial in Borges' and Carpentier's
conceptions of the foundation of narrative fiction, hence deliberately
distinct from the Spanish readings of Cervantes. In this regard "Pierre
Menard, autor del Quijote" is a kind of muffled, yet wildly subversive
manifesto.

"Pierre
Menard, autor del Quijote" is an experiment in authorship without
the presumed determinations of the role in the post-romantic era. Menard,
as author of the Quijote lacks the essential qualities of an author
within the doctrines originating in Romanticism: 1) he is not of the nationality
defined by the language of the work; 2) and (this does not necessarily
follow) he is not a native speaker of the language in which the work is
written; 3) he is not a contemporary of the work, from which follows that
he has experienced more history (in his case three centuries) than the
original author, having therefore knowledge of subsequent developments
of the text's nation of origin and language. We know from Menard's "visible"
work that he was interested in abstract systems, ahistorical and disconnected
from emotion or experience; for instance, chess, or the elaboration of
a poetic language so pure that it in no way resembled everyday speech.
Menard wants to write a Quijote without the "españoladas"
(Hispanicizing boutades) that Maurice Barrès or Dr. Rodríguez
Larreta would have recommended (p. 53).(13) This would
be a Quijote without a Spain self-consciously Spanish that turned
the book into "una ocasión de brindis patrióticos, de soberbia
gramatical, de obscenas ediciones de lujo" (p. 55). Menard faces the task
of writing or re-writing the Quijote as a Latin American author
would: in possession of the language, but not quite a part of its history
and tradition, as these would be defined in the romantic or post-romantic
era. To imagine a literature without the nation is Borges' daring experiment
in "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" at the height of the nationalistic
frenzies of the 1930's (some of which led to Fascism, as in the case of
Maeztu and Barrès).

But why
the Quijote? Why not "Pierre Menard, autor de la Divina comedia?
Or, "Pierre Menard, autor de Los hermanos Karamazof"? For two reasons.
The first is that, after all is said and done, the fact is that Spanish
was Borges' language of choice for his writing. I say choice because he
could have decided early in his career to become an English, German, or
perhaps even French author. He could have been a Pessoa, an author who
seems to have been invented by Borges; or an Apollinaire, or a Conrad.
These were all options and examples that Borges may have had in mind when
he wrote "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote." But because Spanish was the
language in which he wrote, Borges was moved to speculate about how he
belonged to it or it belonged to him, and how he was or was not a part
of its legacy. The Quijote had to loom as the grandest literary
creation in Spanish. This is why there is an agonistic tone in Borges'
story, which styles itself as a kind of elegy to the recently deceased
Menard, as if it had been the prodigious effort to complete his task of
re-writing the Quijote that had killed him. Because Menard was
unable to finish his work, though the narrator confesses that he likes
to read, or think of the entire novel, as if it had been written by him.
It is in the inconclusiveness of his task and in Menard's dying that we
find in Borges a romantic substratum, a glorification of the author that,
on the surface, the story appears to deny. It is the contradictory core
of "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote."

It is
significant that while the universality of Don Quijote as a figure would
presumably make him easy to be authored and re-authored by anyone --Avellaneda
was the first-- as he would be more part of the tradition than of any
individual talent, Cervantes' character has not been rewritten nearly
as many times as, say, Don Juan. Why? Because if seen from within literature
the most universal figure Cervantes created was not so much Don Quijote
as the narrator of Don Quijote, and he has been rewritten every
time a novel is authored.

The second
reason why Menard attempted to write the Quijote (and not some
other work) is precisely that Cervantes had made available to Borges and
even exhausted most possible experiments about authorship, from the very
notion of authority to the connection of language to creation. This was
not in any of the other masterpieces that Menard might have chosen, or
if so only because they had derived it from Cervantes. Cervantes created
himself as author surrounded by several doubles as the second most important
character in the Quijote. The author of the Quijote is that
manifold character that includes (at least) the narrator, Cide Hamete
Benengeli and the translator. In him (in them) Cervantes gave us a prolix
and profound dramatization of the modern mind in search of knowledge of
self and of the inner workings of the literary imagination. In that quest
the mind found itself and the complex operations by which it invents itself
as it creates literature. It is a fragile construction --an unbearable
lightness of being-- fraught with self-doubt and surrounded by mirages
of its own making. To speak, to write, this emerging self must create
yet another, like the friend who comes to its aid in the 1605 prologue,
who will give him a temporary and precarious sense of being. There is
no self-same projection outward and creation must take the guise of someone
else's work: a found manuscript, written in a language not known by the
narrator, who must seek help to have it translated. It is a creation that
babbles "I invent myself, therefore I might be." Because invention, even
of self, is too grand an illusion and agency is always compromised by
uncertainty. This frail self is, ironically enough, Cervantes' most enduring
character. The venue of expression is necessarily irony, the resignation
to always be of at least two minds, particularly about oneself.

In the
Quijote the modern mind finds that literature, as a human product,
cannot escape the limitations of the human; hence the author can only
feign to be outside of his work looking in, controlling his fictional
world externally like Maese Pedro his puppet show. This modern agent who
thinks and writes and invents and therefore is, has no nationality. In
this Cervantes is anticipating Vico and pointing to the universalism of
the Enlightenment. Need we evoke here again the Quijote's games
of authorship, where the origin of the text is, as best as it can be ascertained,
a Moorish historian with a penchant for lying? Or the process by which
the text is generated involving a translation by someone whose competence
seems only to be that he knows the languages in question, and allows himself
the impudence of laughing at a marginal note that he says he finds in
the original to the effect that "Esta Dulcinea del Toboso, tantas veces
en este historia referida, dicen que tuvo la mejor mano para salar puercos
que otra mujer de toda la Mancha" (I, 9). This intrusive translator also
intervenes to question the authority of the author, as if wanting the
reader to believe that he has re-created and annotated the work as he
performed his modest task. Borges latches on to this elusive quality of
the Quijote's author. Is Menard like Cide Hamete or like the translator?
If the Moor was indeed a liar, Menard had a penchant for writing the opposite
of what he believed in, as the narrator of Borges' story claims. Cervantes
made Menard possible by being a Spanish author without "españoladas"
in large measure because he lived before the history of Spain made exceptionalism
a mode of inquiry, a self-reflection and a self-display before a Europe
from which it felt increasingly distant. Menard is the Cervantes Cervantes
would have been in the twentieth century had he been able to skip the
Spanish eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; a Cervantes, that is, who
could have been an Argentine educated in Geneva and working in a Buenos
Aires library. Borges' implicit identification with Menard belies the
rejection of the romantic in his story.

In the
final analysis "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" proves that it
is impossible to leap out of history and uncontrollable contingency; that
both encourage the tendency to err. The narrator of Borges's story gives
1602 as the date for the Quijote and clearly misreads the fragment
about history that he quotes by not taking into account that it is parodic.
Cervantes did not write seriously "...la verdad, cuya madre es la historia,"
so Menard's alleged difference is not that at all. Who is the narrator
of "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote," and what other misreadings
does he add to this dizzying collection? Why does he focus on that passage
on history? And why does he refer to the readers of the magazine where
the partial list of Menard's publications appear as "deplorables" /wretched/
adding that "son pocos y calvinistas, cuando no masones y circuncisos"
(p. 444). Was he, in spite of his criticism of Maurice Barrès,
an ultra-Catholic, anti-Semitic fascist?

As in
Borges, in Carpentier the important figure is Cervantes, not so much Don
Quijote.(14)El arpa y la sombra, written when
Carpentier knew that he was dying of cancer, is the most sustained treatment
of Cervantes. He sets up a series of intertextual associations between
his novel and Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Cervantes'
last book, because like him, Carpentier is summing up his life and works.
It seems to me too that he is drawn to the fantastic, imaginative quality
of the Persiles as an affirmation of the power of fiction, and
establishes a connection between the misty and mysterious world of Iceland
with which Cervantes opens his romance and the supposed trip to those
regions undertaken by Columbus early in his career. Carpentier clearly
wants to link Columbus to Cervantes, and Cervantes to himself as authors
to speculate about the nature of literature and specifically the Latin
American narrative tradition.(15) In El arpa y la
sombra Columbus is summing up his life on his death bed as he awaits
the priest who will administer the last rites. Carpentier was to die two
years after the publication of El arpa y la sombra, Cervantes died
four days after signing the "Dedicatoria" to the Persiles, and
Pierre Menard is dead. The author's death is a prominent element in all
these fictions because they hold in the balance the all or nothing of
beginnings and ends, and the pressing need for the truth in such portentous
moments. Like the Persiles, El arpa y la sombra closes in
Rome, as if to mark the finality and transcendence of their endings.

Another
association between Columbus and Cervantes is through Maese Pedro's "Retablo
de las Maravillas." When the Admiral returns in triumph and goes on a
promotion tour of his Discovery, he sets up a show for the King and Queen
in Barcelona, in which he dresses up the Taínos that he brought
over, and displays them at court. He calls this company his "gran compañía
de Retablo de las Maravillas de Indias" (p. 132). Carpentier's association
of Columbus with one of Cervantes' self-portraits, the picaresque author
and master puppeteer Ginés de Pasamonte, is revealing of his own
probe into his vocation and practice as a writer. This is largely contained
in Columbus' musings as he remembers his life on the brink of death, where
he again alludes to Maese Pedro: "...cuando me asomo al laberinto de mi
pasado en esta hora última, me asombro ante mi natural vocación
de farsante, de animador de antruejos, de armador de ilusiones, a manera
de los saltabancos que en Italia, de feria en feria --y venían
a menudo a Savona-- llevan sus comedias, pantomimas y mascaradas. Fui
trujamán de retablo, al pasear de trono en trono mi Retablo de
Maravillas" (p. 160). Cervantes' projections as author in the Quijote
provide Carpentier with a characters to play, as he assumes the role of
Columbus on his death bed meditating on his record as writer. Carpentier
shrouds this meditation in a vast historical and speculative mantle.

Carpentier
was obsessed with the Discovery of the New World and its impact on the
writing of history and fiction. Here the association of Columbus with
Cervantes is most significant. Simplified, the road from the Admiral to
the author of the Quijote would go like this. By demonstrating
concretely the roundness of the earth, leading to the Copernican revolution
and a new conception of the universe as infinite, Columbus made possible
Montaigne's detached ironic perspective, such as he displays in his famous
essay "On Cannibals," to which there are direct allusions in El arpa
y la sombra. The inversion of values implicit in Montaigne's text
is dramatized in the speech by one of the Taínos that Columbus
has brought back to the Old World, a hilarious passage in which the Europeans
are mercilessly assessed. It is Montaigne's irony that makes Cervantes'
and Carpentier's possible. (Knowing Carpentier, I know that he would not
have disdained the cryptogram CCC, Columbus-Cervantes-Carpentier). The
consequences of the tear on historical and literary discourse caused by
the Discovery is El arpa y la sombra's central theme. Carpentier
dramatizes it by focusing on the ambiguities surrounding Columbus and
his writings.

In Columbus
we have another author who is not a native of the language in which his
text is written. This was a grave irreverence in Borges' part because
he was dealing with the greatest monument of the Spanish language. But
the matter is very serious in Carpentier's novel too. In El arpa y
la sombra the foreign author is none other than the inaugural one
of the Latin American literary canon --in traditional histories and anthologies
of Latin American literature the first text is a fragment from Columbus'
Diary. To make the matter even more complicated, that Diary,
as we know, does not exist as such. It was lost. All we have are the quotations
inserted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas in his compendious Historia
de las Indias, some of which are reconstructions. Like the Quijote,
the founding text of the Latin American literary tradition is a quilt
of languages, citations, translations and re-writings. But it is the origin.
This is why El arpa y la sombra is like an "Aleph" of Latin American
literature, with textual allusions to classics, like Esteban Echevarría's
"El matadero," Sarmiento's Facundo, Neruda's Canto general,
Lezama Lima's "Rapsodia para el mulo," and so forth. It is as if Columbus'
modest letters contained, like kabbalistic vessels, all the future texts
of the Latin American literary tradition. There is a parallel sub-plot
to this in the tangential story about Columbus' body, parts of which would
have had to be kept in the Vatican's archive of relics had he been sainted.
This is a macabre prank on Carpentier's part to underscore the elusiveness
of the textual origins and always debated legitimacy of the Admiral's
texts. As some of you may know, the authenticity of Columbus' remains
is a matter of dispute, with Havana, Seville and Santo Domingo claiming
to have the real ones. Let me underline this: the inaugural text of Latin
American literature is not, like the Poema de Mío Cid, the
kernel of Castilian letters according to the traditional ideology, but
the diaries of a Genoese of uncertain linguistic and cultural lineage.
The foundation of Latin American literature is a hybrid text written in
faulty Spanish, and rewritten by Carpentier, a Menard whose Spanish was
not native either. The link between natural language and literature is
broken in Carpentier because for him, a baroque, creation is always artful,
never natural. But there is an even more personal connection in all this.

The narrator
in the Quijote says that Benenjeli, being an Arab, was something
of a liar, as we saw. We have already also seen that Menard was wont to
write exactly the opposite of what he felt or believed. Carpentier's Columbus,
as he prepares for his final journey, tells himself about the many lies
that he has told, not only to his men in that fateful first voyage, but
also in his manuscripts.

All these
references to lies, we are now allowed to suspect, are oblique allusions
to Carpentier's own lies and obfuscations about his life. The biggest
of these fibs has turned out to be precisely about his birthplace. In
that speech quoted at the beginning, delivered in the presence of King
Juan Carlos --no less-- Carpentier mentions Havana as "the city where
I was born." But now we know that this was a lie that he had sustained
through all of his life, and that he had been born instead in Geneva,
making the issue of his birthplace a polemical one, as Columbus' has been.
This revelation may also finally account for Carpentier's notorious and
stubborn French r, which dogged him all of his life and made some, like
Juan Marinello, write that in the Havana of the twenties he was sometimes
taken for a foreigner.(16) I think that Carpentier must
have figured that he would eventually be found out, and in these words
spoken through Columbus is offering a veiled apology. Why and when did
Carpentier begin to tell this lie? I don't know, but it is something that
deserves closer scrutiny, such as the one devoted by Sergio Chaple to
some of his earliest journalistic stories, for which Carpentier used his
mother's name as a pseudonym, and the still-to-be-analyzed articles on
women's fashion that he wrote for Social under the name "Jacqueline".(17)

The subject
of lies in Carpentier is to not to be taken lightly, in other words, or
as mere titilation and gossip. To lie is a serious activity that brings
up in El arpa y la sombra rather important issues. In lying Columbus,
and Carpentier, is creating or constructing a self, but is that not the
way we all build our self-image in this post-Freudian era. There is in
lying a radical disconnection from the truth of the self as possibility
and as actual performance, as enunciation. Being cut off from that quested
truth is like creating literature without a nation. Lying to oneself,
of course, is an more complicated act, that raises the issue of irony
and has at its basis a doses of self-hatred that is evident in Columbus'
musings and even point at their source in Augustine. Finally, for now,
the question is how different is it to lie from to write literature? Is
literature not a socially sanctioned form of lying? Beyond each work,
if lying is the foundation of the canon in Columbus, how can literature
be edifying, almost in the literal sense of apt to build monuments or
become a monument itself?

The disturbing
point here is that Borges and Carpentier, following Cervantes' lead, find
literature and language fraught with lies, inconsistencies and discontinuities,
all of which taken together may constitute a deeper kind of truth about
humankind. Carpentier was obviously conscious of this and confronts the
issue of truthfulness with yet another prank. The other narrator of El
arpa y la sombra is Pope Pius IX, Mastai Ferreti, who is pondering
the issue of whether or not to put forth the beatification of the Admiral.
Of all the narrators mentioned here, Pope Pius IX is the only one endowed
with infallibility. But he also fails. Like Borges, Carpentier, Columbus
and Menard, Ferreti, a man of two worlds, as a result of his having learned
Spanish and spent time in Chile on a mission. He culls what he thinks
is the truth about the Admiral from the record and forwards the petition
to have him beatified, only to have it denied at the trial. It is no trivial
joke that Carpentier assumes here the voice of a pope. It was to several
popes that Pietro Martyre d'Anghiera, perhaps more than Columbus the original
Latin American narrator, addressed his elegant history of the New World
in the last decades of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century (Pietro
Martyre was yet another non-native narrator of Latin American history,
but he solved the issue by writing in a language that no longer had native
speakers: Latin). Ferreti's failure to canonize Columbus is the final
meaning of Carpentier's searing meditation on literature and authorship,
not to mention self-knowledge and self-projection. The canon, not even
the inaugural founding text, can be anointed with infallibility, particularly
an American canon.

But could
there not be a truth in the combination and amalgam, in the totality of
the major literary myths in a tradition, as is suggested by the Latin
American classics that seem to emanate from the text of El arpa y la
sombra? This is what Carlos Fuentes attempted in his massive Terra
Nostra, in which Cervantes appears as the chronicler. But I think
that Fuentes got his lesson wrong from his masters Carpentier and Borges.
Has anyone noticed that Terra Nostra is a dramatization of Maeztu's
Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina? There are also characters
from Latin American novels in the mix, but the founding fables are those
figures, who live in a future ideal world where they commingle as in a
sort of new Mount Olympus. Fuentes' shuffling of Hispanic narratives in
a blend that would presumably produce a grand synthesis of Spanish and
Latin American literary myths, a global metafiction, could also be, like
Maeztu's, a project of unwitting political consequences, an ultimate denial
of history in favor of an inbred and unchanging cultural purity, no matter
how plural that culture may have been in the beginning. Can there be an
enduring mythic-literary ground? Is not a the American condition a search
for origins that are non-determining and always rest on a gap of history
inaugurated by the Discovery? Is the search for a non-essential kind of
essentialism the basic American story that Cervantes enables Latin American
writers to author? Can something this negative and abstract be a founding
story? How long does an origin, even a negative one, endure?. Could we
follow Carpentier's lead and say that everything, including this, is forever
in Cervantes? Is the American fate, like Don Quijote's, to move on even
after the library has been walled off?

But is
everything really still in Cervantes? Is the post-modern also already
in Cervantes? Is there a Quijote beyond the most recent death of
literature? By positing a fiction that dispenses with tradition and language,
except as a foil, is not the Latin American Quijote already post-modern?
Borges anticipated this question in his "Nota sobre el Quijote"
when he muses about the afterlife of Cervantes' characters in a world
without books:

A Quijote
that joins the ranks of modern popular myths is not that unlikely, given
that Cervantes' book, in dealing with chivalric romances was already concerned
with such figures and stories at their birth at the dawn of the post-Gutenberg
era. Perhaps, who knows, Don Quijote, who first paraded himself in a Lima
carnival almost four-hundred years ago, already strolls the streets of
Euro-Disney, and the next statue of him will stand, not in Havana or Madrid,
but in Orlando, Florida.

Irving
A. Leonard, Books of the Brave. Being an Account of Books and Men
in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New
World, with a new introduction by Rolena Adorno (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), 307.

Of
course I am only refering to Spanish speaking Latin-America, a more
comprehensive treatment would have to include Machado de Asis’Memorias
póstumas de Bras Cubas, whose playful narrator is perhaps
the most direct descendant of Don Quijote's. I have studied the
link between the Spanish and Latin American baroque in Celestina's
Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spain and Latin America (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1995). For the Quijote see the very useful collections
Don Quijote: Meditaciones hispanoamericanas, vol. I (Lanham:
University Press of America, 1998).

But
beyond this, as an approach, perhaps even as a method, I prefer to derive
my readings of texts and plot literary history from what I conceive
as the readings of an earllier text performed by a later one: Cobra
of Celestina for instance. I do not see such critical rewritings
as anxious misreadings in a struggle for an ever-elusive and undefinable
originality, as does my truly dear friend and colleague Harold Bloom.
I view them, instead, as homages to the tradition, celebrations of the
still living and currently relevant (vigentes) elements of a classical
text. I understand these rather as instances of sheltering and legitimation
that re-activate the classic, under whose aegis and guise the new text
emerges. I much prefer the readings embedded in the new literary text
than the work by writers turned critics about the classics (I like Terra
Nostra infinitely more than Cervantes o la crítica de
la lectura). I would not deny that my preference may be due for
my critical intervention to draw out the reading that one literary text
performs on another. But it also stems from my deep-seated belief that
there is an unspoken core in each text, unchartable in all its extension
whose prime mover (whose combinatorial search engine, one would say
today) is the recycling of earlier texts motivated by new circumstances.
The inicial anxiety comes not from the facticity of tradition, but from
a need to fend off the new with the shield of the old, true and tried;
to defuse the threatening now by subsuming it into some old myth whose
efficacy has stood the trial of the ages, which is the role mythology
and religion play in traditional societies. The new text finds the relevant,
the current, the surviving aspects of the old and allows them to live
again in itself, as itself. This is a critical act, act having here
for me the meaning of performance, séance, función,
show. In some privileged text like the Quijote, or "Pierre
Menard, autor del Quijote" the process that I have been
describing is thematized, becoming the story itself.

"When
I later read Don Quijote in the original, it sounded like a bad
translation to me" writes Borges in the "Autobiographical
Essay."Quoted in Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges:
A Literary Biography (New York: Dutton, 1978) 77.

I
take this Rodríguez Larreta to be an allusion to Enrique Larreta,
the Argentine novelist who in La gloria de don Ramiro attempted
to write in the spanish of Phiplip II's Spain. Borges’Menard is not
interested in that kind of pastiche. Maurice Barrès was an anti-Semitic
novelist who developed a theory of the collective unconscious of clearly
fascistic connotations.

The
narrator-protagonist of The lost Steps tries to remember the
opening sentence of the Quijote as he struggles to evoke his
childhood, and later says that they are playing at being conquistadors.
The important part is the one he forgets. There is also an allusion
to the Venta de la Sangre de Toledo in the chapter at the Canadian's
home that is a reference to "La ilustre fregona." In Concierto
barroco Carpentier inserts a line form Maese Pedro's episode, in
part to underline his debt to the Cervantean model and also the pair
Indiano-Criado is like Don Quijote and Sancho. Concierto barroco
México: Siglo XXI Editores, 1974. Filomeno le está haciendo
el cuento de su antepasado al Indiano, y éste le dice, con palabras
tomadas directamente del episodio de Maese Pedro en la segunda parte
de Don Quijote: "prosigue tu historia en línea recta,
muchacho –interrumpe el viajero-y no te metas en curvas ni transversales;
que para sacar una verdad en limpio menester son muchas pruebas y repruebas"(21).
Carnival scenes, etc. The allusion to Maese Pedro's puppet show is to
one of Cervantes'self-portraits as writer, hence to the problem of autorship
and narrative.

The
association between Columbus and Cervantes had been made before. The
two were seen as fortuitous discoveres who stumbled upon things they
did not intend to find and were not really prepared to find. This association
of the two is part of the ingenio lego label attached to Cervantes,
the notion that he was a sort of untutored wit. Americo Castro did much
to dispel this notion in his 1925 El pensamiento de Cervantes,
and later scholars have abandoned the old saw of Cervantes as the natural
talent devoid of learning. But the issue is really not closed, given
tha Cervantes himself, it seems to me, goes to great pains to show the
gap between intention and result in his work. Ultimately no creator
can be fully conscious of the ramifications or portent of his discovery.
The same is true of Columbus. It would be too much to expect for one
man to be responsible for the repercussions of a discovery as radical
as his.